With a full schedule on tap, the 2009 Microsoft PDC (Professional Developers Conference) next week will tout efforts ranging from the company's Windows Azure cloud platform to plans for programming languages

Introduced at last year's PDC, Azure remains a hot topic for the company, based on this year's PDC schedule. One session, entitled "Bridging the Gap from On-Premises to the Cloud," invites attendees to hear " how Microsoft views the future of cloud computing and how it is starting to deliver this vision in the Windows Azure platform."

"Learn how applications can be written to preserve much of the investment in code, programming models, and tools, yet adapt to the scale-out, distributed, and virtualized environment of the cloud," the session description reads. Migrating applications to Azure also will be covered at PDC.

Axum is a project from Microsoft's Parallel Computing Platform. "It's a language that builds on the principles of isolation, agents, and message-passing to increase application safety, responsiveness, scalability and developer productivity," according to the PDC site.

A roadmap for the Silverlight rich Internet application platform will be detailed at PDC. Microsoft's M data and modeling language will be covered as well. "Explore the future of M, where DSL, schema, and lots of other great ideas come together as a single Web-centric data processing language," the PDC Web site states. XAML futures for .Net Framework, Silverlight, and tools will be covered in a separate session.

The Microsoft "Velocity" project, featuring distributed in-memory caching, is to be detailed at PDC. Velocity "will change how you think about scaling your Microsoft .Net-connected applications," a session description reads. Also on the roster of sessions is one entitled, "InferNet: Building Software with Intelligence." Infer.Net is a machine-learning framework for building .Net software that can adapt to a user, learn from examples or work with uncertain information.

Also at PDC, Microsoft will discuss its SQL Server Modeling technology, formerly known as the Oslo modeling platform, Microsoft's Douglas Purdy, a software architect, revealed this week in a blog. But the transformation of Oslo has not sat well with some Microsoft observers.

"Oslo seems to have gone from a potential new enterprise architect modeling platform to just a modeling tool and DSL stack for SQL Server. This ignores all those large enterprise IT departments with heterogeneous data platforms," said one person commenting in the blog.

Conference attendees can hear about two concurrency tools in Microsoft Research: Cuzz, for "Concurrency Fuzzing," which improves concurrency coverage, and FeatherLite, for data-rate detection.

Meanwhile, a panel session is planned on Microsoft perspectives on the future of programming, featuring persons such as Don Box, a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer working on declarative languages.

Microsoft ASP.Net futures will be discussed, covering changes coming with ASP.Net 4. A session entitled "The Future of Garbage Collection" is planned, featuring the creator of the Microsoft Common Language Runtime, Patrick Dussud. "Hear how the [garbage collection] evolved and what the future looks like for the top-of-the-line memory management infrastructure of .NET," the PDC Web site states.

Dynamic binding in C#4 will be covered at the conference.

"While the heritage of C# is as a static programming language, many objects in the world are more dynamic, whether originating from COM, JavaScript, Python, or other places. Interacting with that world from C# used to be painful and error prone, but C# 4 provides deep integration of dynamic binding into the language," according to the PDC sessions page.

Microsoft at PDC will cover its application server technology plans. "Hear how Microsoft is evolving its application server technologies to address the challenges of building, deploying, and managing composite applications in Windows Server and Windows Azure," according to a description of a session entitled, "Microsoft Application Server Technologies: Present and Future."

The company previously has discussed its "Dublin" technology as application server extensions for Windows. Also on tap at PDC is discussion on how the Microsoft BizTalk system integration platform aligns with application server plans.

Microsoft's Visual Studio 2010 platform also will be covered in several sessions at PDC. Microsoft SQL Server 2008 StreamInsight, a platform for rich data processing over real-time event streams, will be covered as well.

This story, "Microsoft developer technologies take center stage at PDC," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest developments in application development at InfoWorld.com.

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